Paul Graham was born in Stafford in 1956. Although he is today an acclaimed photographer, his artistic practice was initially but a hobby. He trained as a microbiologist at Bristol University, learning photography independently and on his own, and building on a first childhood experience with a camera as a budding scout. In the university library he came across the works of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Edward Weston and Paul Strand, and realised photography is a way to say something meaningful. Immediately, he began experimenting, and cites William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Lee Friedlander as abiding influences, alongside formalists such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz as influences for these early stages.
Graham’s lack of formal artistic training did not restrain his talent, and he quickly rose to prominence for his unconventional documentary-style approach. Controversy partially fuelled the visibility of his new era-announcing work. Between 1981 and 1986, the photographer published three books of colour prints: A1 – The Great North Road (1983), documenting the life and people along the A1 motorway; Beyond Caring (1986), documenting the dole offices in Britain; and Troubled Land (1987), documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a subject later revisited with Cease Fire in 1994. As soon as his first publication, Graham revolutionised the established status quo with his vibrant colours and raw spontaneous capturing technique, converting many of his peers. In a Britain still very much invested in black-and-white photography based on establishing shots, such freedom raised a few eyebrows. Although denigrated by some at the time (his method was even described as ‘poisonous’ for the medium), this first trilogy of books made history in British photography and is widely sought after. In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the complete set of prints from The Great North Road, proving the publication’s lasting impact.
A later informal trilogy, American Night (1998–2002), a shimmer of possibility (2004–2006), and The Present (2009–11), presented jointly during the 2015 solo exhibition The Whiteness of the Whale in San Francisco and Atlanta, illustrate further evolutions. Rawness is accentuated and evidence of a straightforward subject matter (which remains centred around inequality in all its forms) diluted in the nothingness of daily occurrences. These books are conceived and often compared to literary short stories, evoking the quills of Anton Chekhov, Richard Ford or John Updike. Graham explained this change by his move to New York, which he considered way more advanced in the field of photography than London. There, he realised that subtle says more than the obvious. His subject matter thus became more elusive, seeking to pull ‘something out of the ether of nothingness’ as he phrases it. Much like A1 – The Great North Road, American Night garnered surprised incomprehension upon its publication, many critics thinking the printing process had corrupted the images that the photographer had purposefully overexposed and bleached out, trying to capture the blinding impression of stepping into light after having spent time in the dark.
Overall, Graham has published three survey monographs and 17 other publications. His work has been exhibited in the Italian Pavilion of the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) and Switzerland’s national Fotomuseum Winterthur. He had a solo exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, was included in the Tate’s Cruel and Tender survey exhibition of 20th century photography (2003) and a European mid-career survey exhibition at Museum Folkwang, Essen, which toured to the Deichtorhallen, Germany, and Whitechapel Gallery, London.
He is also a Winston Churchill Memorial Fellow (1983), has won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2009), the Hasselblad Award (2012), received the W. Eugene Smith Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), and won the inaugural Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards prize for best photographic book of the past 15 years.
Now an established name, Graham supports the younger generation, eager to help them find new ways to capture their reality and find the voice their context requires.
